The play that won the game for the Indiana Pacers Tuesday night deserved a bucket. The ethical fan of the Milwaukee Bucks, otherwise mired in frustration and disillusionment this fine spring morning, cannot deny this much: Rick Carlisle sketched up a beaut.
Down three points with just under four seconds to play, the Pacers used a timeout to move the ball into the front court, but then positioned the inbounder's four teammates in the backcourt, in a spread formation not unlike what you'd see before a Hail Mary pass in football. The possibility flashed through my mind; it must've occurred to the Bucks, who were gesturing and repositioning and glancing around in uncertainty until the moment the play was triggered.
If what looked to a television viewer like confusion was, indeed, confusion, it probably had to do with the fact that this is not how NBA teams tend to run inbounds plays. Just moments earlier the Bucks had run a basic, garden-variety set, stacking their players in the front court and then using just some turned shoulders and closing pathways to give Damian Lillard a little distance from his defender. It helped, of course, that the Bucks didn't need a bucket and were instead hoping to waste some clock, but this is the normal look of things: one inbounder, with four teammates stationed nearby in position to quickly screen for one another and then to turn and provide a quick outlet for the passer. When the Pacers went weird and spread themselves out in the back court, for a moment I thought they might be trying to trick the Bucks into defending the wrong basket. My next thought was Hail Mary.
The Pacers weren't going for a chaotic jump ball. The idea all along was to get the rock into the hands of Tyrese Haliburton. "Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a set that we run," an elated Haliburton confirmed after the game. "It's a set that we got in for late-game." His job on the play is to get open, and then to shoot. Carlisle lines everyone up in the backcourt to take advantage of both his team's speed and of the confusion the set can cause.
With Andrew Nembhard inbounding, Haliburton is along the far baseline, in the back court, in something like a wide receiver stance. Aaron Nesmith is on the near sideline, in the same stance, and between them, stacked like a tailback and a fullback, are the team's two bigs, in this case Myles Turner in front and Pascal Siakam behind.
The action begins as the referee is handing the ball to Nembhard. Turner rushes forward and engages the first defender, Gary Trent Jr., in the middle of the court. Turner, who is huge, is not looking for a positional mismatch, not in a situation where the Pacers need a three-pointer; he's looking for Giannis Antetokounmpo, positioned as the last defender back, the safety. Turner scrapes off Trent, weaves toward Nembhard, then swerves back and gets his body into Antetokounmpo, occupying the most dangerous defender on the court for a precious half-second. There's a lot of this type of thing: The play is designed for Haliburton, and it is the job of the other Pacers on the court to bump and slow and otherwise divert the attention of the five Bucks defenders.
Siakam, who starts the play immediately behind Turner, delays his own start. The idea appears to be to allow enough room for Nesmith to cut through the alley directly behind Turner and run something like a wheel route, breaking diagonally across the court and then sprinting vertically. Nesmith isn't looking for an over-the-top fade to the far pylon: For one thing, this is the sport of basketball that we are talking about, and for another, that would be far too risky a pass for these circumstances and far too complicated a catch-and-shoot opportunity. Nesmith's job is to drag at least one defender from the near side of the court to the far side, and hopefully to cause some collisions in the traffic along the route.
The Bucks, to their credit, played this mostly correctly, in the sense that no one fell over and they left no shooters entirely open. You will notice that we have not yet talked about Haliburton's defender. At the start of the play, Haliburton is being guarded on the far sideline by Taurean Prince. Haliburton runs Nesmith's same route, but in reverse, heading diagonally across the court before cutting vertically along the near sideline. Where Nesmith darts between Turner and Siakam, Haliburton shuffles his feet and then cuts behind Siakam. We have already gone Football Mode for a lot of this blog so let's call this what it is: a rub route! The idea is to cause a collision, and in this case it works: Just as Haliburton is looping around at the very back of the play, Prince is smashing into Nesmith and completely losing his assignment. Haliburton has a free run toward Nembhard and then up the near sideline, with only big slow Brook Lopez to prevent a clean hookup.
Here is where we must pause for a moment of Antetokounmpo appreciation. The Pacers called up a creative set tailored for the specific athletic gifts of their roster, and then executed it beautifully. And the reward for this was an unbelievably tough shot, a shot that at the moment it left Haliburton's hands appeared to have no hope whatsoever. Giannis did that.
Playing safety and refusing to be distracted by Turner's quasi-screen, Giannis sees the play developing in front of him, recognizes the threat immediately, and sprints out to contest the shot with unbelievable, superhuman timing. It was a football-type play, and so I will say that had this been football, and had the safety on the play been, say, Sean Taylor, and had Taylor arrived on the scene with approximately the same timing as Antetokounmpo, the receiver would've next experienced consciousness in a whole different part of the calendar. Yes, Carlisle's play is designed to get a shot for Haliburton along the near sideline, and yes, in fact, it did produce such a shot. But this was extremely not the shot anyone had in mind. You could almost believe that Haliburton shot the ball in terror of the huge ferocious thing rushing toward him.
The referees decided that Antetokounmpo took away the shooter's landing zone with his contest, although that's a bit of a tough call considering basically nothing was going to prevent Haliburton from ending this play on the floor. Haliburton made the free throw to put the Pacers up a point, which means that his outrageous three-pointer was technically not the game-winner. Still: What a shot! Look at the huge long arc on that sucker! It's in the air for a lifetime.
The Pacers are so fun. They're precise about many things and fast about everything. They were the better team Tuesday, morally and qualitatively, to such a degree that the cosmos reached down and helped Haliburton's heave into the hoop, when by rights a shot that desperate should've landed in Fort Wayne.
A lot of the difference between these two playoff teams and division foes can be measured in opportunities like these. The Pacers play with pace and verve and commitment, and good things happen, but even when good things happen they look hard. The Bucks are predictable, uninspired, and visibly frustrated; their version of hunting a game-winner involved throwing the ball to Giannis in the back court and having him run in a straight line, dumb thudding stuff that managed to give the final shot to the single worst shooter on the court. This failed humorously—Giannis's majestic running three-pointer barely touched the rim—but was also sort of terrifying, for condensing the fate of both teams to a single action from a genuine basketball god, a being who cannot be completely fathomed by us normies. That's the Bucks in a nutshell: When it works, it's almost always only because they have some special dudes out there.
The Pacers might not have any truly special dudes. You cannot fail to miss that they give some very important minutes to former Wizard and spiritual Wizard Thomas Bryant, as well-meaning and brick-handed a goofus as you will find in the rotation of any legitimate playoff team. It's not clear at all that Indiana has eight playoff-caliber players; I'm not totally sure that each of their starters would even have a rotation job on, say, the Oklahoma City Thunder, or the Cleveland Cavaliers, or the Boston Celtics. Their guards do a lot of driving and fun and wacky Steve Nash dribbling but without the shooters for a murderous drive-and-kick attack, and so the Pacers wind up taking the sixth-fewest threes per game in the league. Their best passer and pick-and-roll operator, Haliburton, struggles to outrun Brook damn Lopez, a 36-year-old center who has not truly "run" since college. Their craftiest ball-handler, T.J. McConnell, cannot shoot and prefers not to. Their best floor-spacers are Siakam and Turner, two slow-loading stand-still bombers with the shooting versatility of a cannon from the Napoleonic Wars. It's all delightfully down market, like a secondhand but tasteful and immaculately maintained living room set. Buddy, it rules.
There's something admirable and even a little bit moving to be said for employing a bunch of well-meaning professionals, insisting that they are capable of playing winning basketball, and then putting them in the best positions for success. It's just the case that in basketball terms that is often only said about the Indiana Pacers, stubborn non-tankers and long-term tenants of the play-in zone. For what feels like the 1,000th consecutive season, I find myself rooting for good things to happen to this team, because they work hard and overachieve and make it look fun. Carlisle's play was great, Indiana's players ran it just right, and then the dudeliest dude on the court, naturally not a Pacer, almost took it all away. He was a split second late, and the Pacers were allowed to keep the little bit of advantage they'd chiseled away for themselves, and profit by it. They'll need lots more of these cosmic interventions on the path to playoff glory, but you can always be sure the Pacers are doing their part.
